Pope Benedict XVI said Tuesday he was "deeply ashamed" of the clergy sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church and will work to keep pedophiles out of the priesthood, addressing the toughest issue facing the American church as he began his first papal trip to the United States.
Yeah, when’s he going to start? After he gets all the remaining current ones transferred to posts in Italy? If I were Catholic, I’d be deeply ashamed of the Pope.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
La Belle wonders how much this party is going to cost us taxpayers. A lot.
However, there will be some uninvited guests, although they will surely have to stay in the "free speech zones" out of sight.
"We cannot welcome this pope until he begins to do away with the church's continuing violence of sexism," said Sister Donna Quinn, coordinator of the National Coalition of American Nuns.
Organized groups will be protesting the church’s refusal to ordain women, its ban on contraception and stand on gay rights, and sex abuse by priests.
As well they should. As well they should.
P.S. Benny himself won't even be going to the party in his honor, in case you were thinking it's a waste of your hard-earned money - it's even moreso.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
KAZIMIERZ DOLNY, Poland - Police evicted 65 rebellious ex-nuns Wednesday from a convent they illegally occupied for two years after defying a Vatican order to replace their mother superior, a charismatic leader who had religious visions.The defeated nuns walked out in their black habits — some carrying guitars, drums and tambourines — after a locksmith opened the gate to the walled compound and police in riot gear rushed in and arrested the mother superior.
[...]
About 150 police in riot gear went into the compound to find the ex-nuns defiantly singing religious songs and playing instruments
[...]
"Today's police intervention was a sort of act of desperate aid for people who for the past two years have lived in very unusual conditions, in a closed environment, in seclusion, in uncertainty, where various forms of thought take shape," the PAP news agency quoted Zycinski as saying.
"One could clearly see that tension and aggression during today's intervention."
…it being highly unlikely otherwise that anyone would react tensely and aggressively in the face of riot-geared police rushing them. The police were merely there to protect them from themselves.
"They were disobedient," said Mieczyslaw Puzewicz, a spokesman for the Lublin diocese of the Roman Catholic Church.
Bingo.
Two decades. That didn't take long.Eugene O'Sullivan, believed to be the first Massachusetts priest convicted of sexual abuse more than two decades ago, has been dismissed from the priesthood by the Vatican, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Boston said yesterday.
And I'm not sure how that goes. If you leave voluntarily, you're still a priest until the Vatican dismisses you?O'Sullivan, who served at a number of parishes in the area, including St. Agnes Church in Arlington, was sentenced to probation in 1984 after he admitted sodomizing a 13-year-old altar boy at St. Ann's Parish in Marshfield. One condition of his probation was that he not be allowed to work with children, but church officials, who had pleaded with a judge for leniency on his behalf, later assigned him priestly duties at four New Jersey parishes.[...]
The Vatican has dismissed another priest, Paul E. McDonald, who had served in parishes in Hyde Park and Marlborough, Donilon said.
McDonald was accused of raping boys when he was a priest at St. Joseph Church in Hyde Park in the 1960s. He eventually left the priesthood voluntarily in 1976 after getting a woman pregnant.
Like somewhere they didn't know he'd been raping little boys for 40 years?Documents from O'Sullivan's personnel file, made public in 2002, show that the archdiocese was alerted as early as the 1960s about allegations against him.[...]
In a 2003 deposition Law gave in lawsuits filed against the archdiocese, he defended his decision to allow O'Sullivan to transfer from St. Agnes to the Diocese of Metuchen, N.J., less than a year after he pleaded guilty to sodomizing the 13-year-old boy. Law said he wanted to give O'Sullivan a chance at ''redemption."
''Obviously, if someone is going to start out fresh, it would be advantageous for that to be in a new place," Law said in the deposition.
Promote the evil doers. Let's see....where else do we see that tendency?O'Sullivan's case was cited in Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly's scathing 2003 report on the clergy sex abuse crisis that showed how, for many years, former cardinal Bernard F. Law and his senior managers knew that substantial numbers of children in the archdiocese had been sexually abused by substantial numbers of its priests.
Using previously unreleased church documents obtained through grand jury subpoenas, Reilly's report asserted that then-Bishop Robert J. Banks urged prosecutors and a judge to be lenient toward O'Sullivan, even though Banks knew that O'Sullivan had other victims. Banks later became bishop of the Diocese of Green Bay, Wis.
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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